Trauma and Transcendence: Suffering and the Limits of Theory

By Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Trauma theory has become a burgeoning site of research in recent decades, often demanding interdisciplinary reflections on trauma as a phenomenon that defies disciplinary ownership. While this research has always been challenged by the temporal, affective, and corporeal dimensions of trauma itself, trauma theory now faces theoretical and methodological obstacles given its growing interdisciplinarity. Trauma and Transcendence gathers scholars in philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and social theory to engage the limits and prospects of trauma’s transcendence. This volume draws attention to the increasing challenge of deciding whether trauma’s unassimilable quality can be wielded as a defense of traumatic experience against reductionism, or whether it succumbs to a form of obscurantism.

Contributors: Eric Boynton, Peter Capretto, Tina Chanter, Vincenzo Di Nicola, Ronald Eyerman, Donna Orange, Shelly Rambo, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Hilary Jerome Scarsella, Eric Severson, Marcia Mount Shoop, Robert D. Stolorow, George Yancy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Aug 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9780823280285

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Mary-Jane Rubenstein is professor of religion and science in society at Wesleyan University, and is affiliated with the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She holds a BA from Williams College, an MPhil from Cambridge University, and a PhD from Columbia University. Her research unearths the philosophies and histories of religion and science, especially in relation to cosmology, ecology, and space travel. She is the author of Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (Columbia University Press, 2018); Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia University Press, 2014); and Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (Columbia University Press, 2009). She is also co-editor with Catherine Keller of Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (Fordham University Press, 2017), and co-author with Thomas A. Carlson and Mark C. Taylor of Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Her latest book is titled Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Limits of Theory in Trauma and Transcendence

Eric Boynton and Peter Capretto

Aporia and Intelligibility in Trauma Theory

Within the humanities, specifically in the past decade, trauma theory has become a robust site of interdisciplinary work. Trauma resonates with scholars in and across disciplines and has become a trope with a distinctive significance. Whereas philosophers and social theorists a generation ago drew almost exclusively upon classical trauma theory, derivative of the psychological and psychoanalytic traditions, recent studies have rooted themselves in a more immediate past. Researchers now turn to many late twentieth-century figures such as Jacques Derrida,¹ Cathy Caruth,² and Judith Herman³ as touchstones for their own disciplinary insights. While this diaspora of theory has strengthened cultural and philosophical reflections on a subject matter once dominated by psychiatry, it has also made trauma’s once unified subject matter variegated across disciplines, particularly in the humanities. Given the many conflicts among these disciplines and their methods, the very idea of trauma is becoming increasingly unclear. The scope of scholarship on trauma has always been challenged by the temporal, affective, and corporeal dimensions of trauma itself, yet it has recently been rendered all the more complex by theoretical and methodological issues that have emerged for these disciplines in their attempts to think trauma.

Trauma studies faces a recurrent challenge in so far as its efforts to delineate the field or make prescriptive claims on its future are easily shot down as reductive. Several competing narratives have vied for the fate and future of trauma studies since the field became formally recognized in the early to mid 1990s. The seminal contributions of Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub have foregrounded the sense that trauma ought to be distinguished by its non-assimilable character.⁴ Though careful not to fall into the trap of deliberate obscurantism, these theorists caution against headstrong and totalizing definitions of trauma. Caruth, as a humanist working in trauma theory, is interested not so much in further defining trauma, that is, than in attempting to understand its surprising impact: to examine how trauma unsettles and forces us to rethink our notions of experience.⁵ Such governing interpretations have held substantive yet ambivalent influence over scholars in the social sciences and humanities working on trauma. Methodologically, those maintaining the irreducibility of trauma have simultaneously deployed and critiqued medical, anthropological, and psychoanalytic analyses of traumatic repression and testimony. Our inability to give adequate testimony does not necessarily refute reductive readings of trauma; more accurately, it may point out the ideological character of certain medical, psychiatric, or even historical reductions of trauma built on the promise of intelligibility.

The phenomenon of trauma as an aporetic event thus has a dual effect of unsettling reductive readings of trauma but also entrenching trauma studies in repetitions of the moment when thought reaches its limit. In either case, the aporia of trauma potentially forecloses rather than opens up prospects in thinking the claim that trauma is a non-assimilable event. As cultural and film theorists Ann Kaplan and Thomas Elsaesser both warn, a realistic worry⁶ is that trauma will conceptually become too handy a catch-all for resolving the aporias or lacunas of previous theoretical configurations in their fields.⁷ One consequence of this trend is that scholars become motivated to admonish those considering trauma in a defined or operationalized way typified by the psychiatric and medicalized community. Vincenzo Di Nicola, a contributor to the volume with training in both psychiatry and philosophy, goes to great lengths to parse out these dichotomies between what he terms the psychiatric and cultural communities of trauma theory. Across a spectrum of disciplines, ranging from emergency medicine to philosophy, fewer and fewer disciplines may have satisfactory ways of operationalizing trauma or arriving at a standard definition. Yet the mere fact of this spectrum should not mandate disciplines such as philosophy, literature, religion, and film to adopt a default position wherein trauma can only be theorized as an aporetic phenomenon to which one is drawn yet of which no one can speak.

By bringing together scholars at the intersections of trauma, social theory, and the continental philosophy of religion, one intent of this volume is to draw attention to the increasing challenge of deciding whether trauma’s transcendent, evental, or unassimilable quality is being wielded as a defense of traumatic experience against reductionism, or whether it is promulgated as a form of obscurantism—a common critique against theory in contemporary continental thought. Here, the Freudian charge against religion as occultism takes on a new valence when directed toward trauma’s transcendence: What is in question is not in the least an invasion of the field of religion by the scientific spirit, but on the contrary an invasion by religion of the sphere of scientific thought.⁸ Introducing the claim of unintelligibility into the field of trauma studies—a field already wrangling with an unclear object of study—may conceal the fact that humanities research is becoming increasingly irrelevant. The contribution of the humanities to trauma studies introduces a peculiar bind: Without deliberately obscuring progress in trauma studies, the humanities’ future in trauma studies may become precarious or short.

One defense against this alleged double bind is to insist that fields like the continental philosophy of religion are not merely playing theoretical games with the phenomenon of trauma. No one is willfully obscuring potentially better understandings and definitions; the material substance of trauma is being responsibly sought; it just so happens that the ways the phenomenon of trauma is reduced or operationalized fails to capture the lived experience of trauma’s substance. In this view, trauma becomes not so much a transcendental concept or evental experience, but more accurately a heuristic around which scholarly disciplines and practices share their resources to better understand. Wherever the future of trauma studies is headed, these person-centered claims must be taken seriously to ensure its discourse remains closely tied to the concrete and material context of traumatic encounter. Yet for those in the humanities and cognate disciplines with training in the history of ideas, special scrutiny must also be given to the ways that personal suffering can be co-opted by a surreptitiously metaphysical defense of trauma. Disputes over what experiences pass as traumatic may help defend vulnerable populations, and their already thin identity as survivors of trauma, from being appropriated as unintelligible. But interdisciplinary research in the humanities should also be cautious about the ways that these conversations are wedded to the idea that there really is an essence to trauma.

From a phenomenological perspective, the pursuit of intelligibility in trauma studies may seem to reaffirm the Husserlian principle of principles for philosophy to remain committed to the things themselves, or as the case may be with trauma, a commitment to bodilyness or Leibhaftigkeit. Trauma studies in the humanities could be distinguished by its own bracketing of the naturalistic attitude, which rejects medicalized and empirical approaches that presume to know how trauma operates in an unreflective way. The question then becomes whether, through this proprietary epoché, the foregrounding of trauma as an unassimilable event forecloses or broadens the phenomenological horizon of thinking. If allusions to transcendence and event only structure a critique against scientific operationalisms of trauma, then humanities research in trauma theory falls prey to the Freudian critique: Trauma studies in the humanities only protects itself by eviscerating all other constructive efforts to theorize.

Trauma and the Continental Philosophy of Religion

Disciplines often organize themselves around fundamentally enigmatic con cepts, thereby constituting their academic discourse as the pursuit for greater clarity on basic yet fundamental terms: What is wisdom; how do we understand the psyche; what counts as religion; where does one locate society? Yet given the aporetic quality of trauma’s intelligibility, disciplinary attempts to claim or monopolize trauma theory as its own quickly become problematic. The traps of reductionism and obscurantism in thinking trauma are partly a consequence of methodological incompatibility across disciplines: One discipline’s careful analysis is another’s theoretical violence. There are, indeed, broader arguments to be made, particularly against the empirical methods employed by scientific disciplines, which can only ever operationalize trauma; at the same time, these operationalizing disciplines can reasonably defend themselves on the grounds that, unlike more humanistic fields, they are actually stating their claims constructively enough to make themselves vulnerable to critique. This volume cannot hope to resolve these disputes, since, quite simply, not all scholars who invoke the name trauma are having the same conversation. Emphasizing the points at which the shared problem or approach of trauma reaches its limit, as this volume does, opens up, however, the potential for greater interdisciplinary progress in trauma studies.

Linked to the consideration of these disciplinary and methodological limits, recent developments in the continental philosophy of religion also focus on the aporetic analysis endemic to trauma studies. In and through such analysis, thinkers working within the context of continental thought not only have found the resources for and interest in encountering religious themes anew, but those themes are themselves encountered as disclosive phenomenological limit-experiences. Religion manifests itself in this approach as philosophically significant and able to reorient philosophy,⁹ propose directions for fundamental questioning left unattended by philosophy, even direct thinking toward what would constitute first philosophy. The continental philosopher of religion finds herself called to explore the enigma of religious phenomena, and addressed by the themes of the suffering other. She seeks to expose philosophy to the exteriority of the religious, taking up the dominant obsession with otherness or difference that has gripped the continental tradition in philosophy. This obsession, inaugurated in French thinking of recent decades, turns thought toward the aporia of the gift or the enigma of the face thereby stretching the character of phenomenological inquiry.¹⁰ Indeed, the continental reflection on religion appears less an investigation that takes religion as its object than a submission to the salutary shock of something different. In this approach, religion harbors an exteriority that becomes a source of amazement, an aporia for thought stretched to its limit. In the attempt to make thematic the encounter with the appearance of a phenomenon excessive of its very phenomenality, thought reaches its limits or is challenged by the logic of the claim. Indeed, religious themes and phenomena have become amazing (thaumaston) again.

Yet this amazement in the face of religious themes and phenomena—bent as it is toward aporias, wounds, paradoxes, sites of saturation, impossibilities paradigmatically religious—also has its detractors. Taking up the theme of the gift or givenness, some have pointed to the dependence upon hyperbole in establishing the significance of this amazement. Infamously, the conditions of possibility of the gift—that it is completely free and that it is present, or identifiable as such—are simultaneously its conditions of impossibility: No gift that is ever present is completely free, and if it is not present then we cannot know it as a gift. The gift structurally exemplifies what Derrida calls the impossible, where conditions of possibility meet with conditions of impossibility in an aporia. One aspect of this aporia is the requirement that ingratitude constitute the proper response to the gift in order that it is not annulled by a return of the giving gesture in an economic exchange. To think the pure gift as such, ingratitude must be held as a condition. Such an argument about the impossibility of giving falls victim to the common problem in the continental philosophy of religion of being unhelpfully hyperbolic in its reliance on a particular rhetorical device. Adriaan Peperzak, for one, has argued that "such rhetorical exaggerations can be appreciated if their irony is obvious and if they are not overworked. [. . .] The numerous repetitions of this exaggeration have robbed it of its rhetorical charm and impact, but they have hardly strengthened the idea (or the idée fixe) contained in it."¹¹ This hyperbolic exaggeration of a rhetorical scheme only exacerbates an already opaque phenomenon. We are left uncertain of whether we can reflect on religion and avoid consigning the significance of religion to the secret of faith or sacrifice its significance at the threshold of intelligibility without reducing religion’s relation to thought as extremity.

This rhetorical trend in turn risks creating an unproductive and foreclosing set of prospects for the continental philosophy of religion and its task of thinking the aporia of gift: "If the argument is right, it seems that one must choose between complete cynicism and a fideistic leap to the impossible possibility of generosity, giving, love, friendship and so on."¹² That is, rather than sustaining the aporetic quality of phenomena such as trauma and gift, the continental philosophy of religion potentially requires a more classically Kierkegaardian situation, a paradoxical Either/Or that forces an impossible response: Either there is a paradox, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute, or Abraham is lost.¹³ Such a perspective seems committed to the prior significance of the religious as a site of extremity because thought cannot investigate it.¹⁴ In such a context, philosophy of religion, if there were one, becomes an impossible task, attempting to think through the source or site of amazement that is simply beyond such scrutiny.¹⁵

This is precisely where the paradox that lies at the heart of trauma studies can inform debates and impasses in the continental philosophy of religion—the phenomenon of trauma cannot be left to itself as merely enigmatic but requires a therapeutic and ethical response if it is to be properly attended. This turn is inextricably linked to the question of ethics and the existence of the other person who calls me into question and places a demand of non-injury on me. The ethical engagement with alterity and the suffering other can thus be thought in terms of an engagement with the unconditioned as such, laying hold of questions traditionally issuing from a theological perspective.

If such a possibility constitutes the novelty of the continental reflection on religion, then trauma studies as an interdisciplinary investigation of such a double bind is instructive. How can we step back from hyperbolic claims that have rightly rendered the religious amazing in order to clear the space to think through this amazement as it finds expression? If we leave aside a hyperbolic outbidding¹⁶ of two directions for discerning the ‘pure’ and proper possibility of religion,¹⁷ do the tensions at the heart of trauma studies provide a way of thinking the extremity of phenomena while recognizing that our amazement cannot be left merely as an unknowable secret before which one stands in awe? Can amazement be found in the striving between moments of appropriation and expropriation? Can the purity of a transcendent analysis locate its desideratum by attending to the unbearable brokenness of an immanent yet bottomless harm?

Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Transcendent Phenomenon

By naming the limits of intelligibility of trauma through interdisciplinary sources, this volume seeks to multiply ethical and methodological openings for trauma studies. While the need for institutional and disciplinary critiques of reductive analyses of trauma remain, critical reflections in the continental philosophy of religion frees up critical energy to scrutinize the looming specters of metaphysical reductionism within humanities research, not just outside of it. This also means that phenomenology, the philosophy of religion, and philosophical disciplines in the social sciences can focus on the pressing ethical issues of how to cultivate responses to racial, cultural, sexual, and colonial trauma. However, because this project focuses on the limitations of trauma theory within philosophical and interdisciplinary humanities settings, it does not purport to offer a systematic treatment of every profound instance of trauma. For instance, the volume offers a supplement to the saturated body of literature on war trauma and torture without directly addressing existing scholarship on war trauma and torture. By recognizing the evental and transcendent character of trauma, it contends that humanities research can begin thinking transcendence, truth, and event in ways that do not merely subsume trauma into categories which have, following Heidegger’s warning, already been exhausted and entrenched in tired theoretical machinations.

This volume gathers scholars in a variety of disciplines to meet the challenge of how to think trauma in light of its burgeoning interdisciplinarity, and often its theoretical splintering. From a distinctive disciplinary vector, the works of philosophers, social theorists, philosophical psychologists and theologians consider the limits and prospects of theory when thinking trauma and transcendence. The primary arc of the assembled chapters names critically and responds generatively to the ways theory has been shaped, even conceptually isolated, by the disciplines invested in work on trauma. Toward this end, three areas of concern facing the disciplines and the humanities generally structure the volume: Constructive Phenomenologies of Trauma, Social and Political Analyses of Traumatic Experience, and Theological Aporia in the Aftermath of Trauma.

In the first section, Vincenzo Di Nicola, Robert Stolorow, Donna Orange, Eric Boynton, and Eric Severson ask how the interdisciplinary reception of phenomenology problematizes trauma as a philosophical and ethical category, and propose avenues for constructive phenomenologies of trauma. For Vincenzo Di Nicola, while the goal of both clinical work and cultural research generally is the transformation and transcendence of trauma, these communities struggle to characterize trauma as a unified discourse even within one discipline. In his chapter, he makes three proposals that provide order for the concept of trauma through conceptual dichotomies that divide their discourses: First, the term has accrued a supplementarity or excess, which helps explain the variation between the clinical use of trauma and its cultural avatar; second, theorists must separate the ways the word trauma is deployed within the trauma process; third, trauma must be separated radically from Event, which is the subtext of a cultural trauma theory. This philosophical archaeology offers keys of translation between these competing cultural and psychiatric trauma theories, calls to deactivate the desubjectivation associated with trauma, and opens new prospects for interdisciplinary research in these intersecting fields based on the possibilities of the Event.

Beginning with a brief overview of his scholarship in intersubjective systems theory, Robert Stolorow considers the evolving conception of emotional trauma within the phenomenological-contextualist psychoanalytic perspective. Through reflections on his own traumatized states and studies of existential philosophy, he argues that trauma’s essentially contextual features demand a ethics of finitude rooted in emotional dwelling, which embraces the unbearable vulnerability and context-dependence of human existence. Donna Orange, who has been an interlocutor and coauthor with Stolorow for decades, makes an independent though related claim regarding the infinite obligation demanded by the transcendence of traumatic experience. Focusing on the egoism that emerges from social domination and racial privilege, and the crisis of climate change, Orange makes the radical ethical claim that persons must allow themselves to be traumatized, persecuted, taken hostage by the starvation and homelessness of others. Her suggestion, which is both classically Levinasian and attuned to contemporary situations of social trauma, is that transcendence in trauma underscores our responsibility for all, which in turn is indispensable for facing up to the challenges of the climate emergency and continuing racial and colonial injustices.

The final two chapters in this opening section extend the Levinasian reflections on Trauma, more specifically on the problems of phenomenological unconcealment and commemoration. Responding to the recent attempts in modern thought to commemorate historical trauma in our genocidal age, Eric Boynton’s chapter links the lingering enigmatic quality of evil as a theological term with recent trauma theory and the counter-monuments proposed and completed by the German installation artist, Horst Hoheisel. Linking Levinas’s work with Hoheisel’s constructions and trauma theory’s characterization of trauma as non-assimilable with recent philosophical considerations of evil and suffering, Boynton offers a fundamentally different approach to commemoration. His claim is that Hoheisel’s attempt to bring to presence that which is essentially absent opens up an alternative approach to evil and trauma issuing from the perspective of absence and loss, thereby granting the failure of therapeutic techniques an ethical significance.

Eric Severson’s chapter considers how Levinas utilizes trauma to refer to the pre-original unsettling of the auto-identification of the ego, a project that takes center stage in his final masterwork, Otherwise than Being. Building from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Heidegger’s work on unconcealment, he argues that whereas for Heidegger and Plato trauma occurs through unconcealment of sensation, for Levinas trauma occurs as an interruption of sensation’s appropriation into perception itself. His contribution focuses principally on the event itself, the encounter with the other, which at times he calls inspiration instead of trauma, and the way this event occurs in a time-before-time that initiates the very possibility of responsibility.

In the second section, Tina Chanter, George Yancy, Ronald Eyerman, and Peter Capretto interrogate what strategies might aid social discourse in the humanities to resist the pervasive tendency of politically entrenching traumatic encounters within racial, moral, and psychological categories that exacerbate their violence. Tina Chanter’s chapter explores the context of Rancière’s critique of Lyotard, particularly regarding the attenuation of any sense to trauma that accumulates a privileged status for its singular event. It is, in effect, deeply attentive to and critical of the question: If every one is traumatized, what specific meaning remains for trauma? In highlighting Rancière’s resistance to the absolutization of the other in politics and art, and Lyotard’s tendency to turn alterity into the unrepresentable, the unassimilable, and the unthinkable, Chanter contends that the consequences for trauma theory are precisely what Rancière forebodes with the appropriation of the sublime: For all its talk of art witnessing that which is unrepresentable—and the holocaust as the unrepresentable per se—the ethical turn only manages to rejoin a discourse of purism.

In his chapter, George Yancy theorizes racialization as an interstitial process that becomes a site of trauma, wounding, and felt terror of both symbolic and existential annihilation. In the context of white supremacy, white privilege, and white power, he argues that whiteness functions as the transcendental norm that obfuscates its own racialization and normative constitution vis-à-vis Blackness, thereby marking the Black body within the socio-political matrix as dangerous, evil, suspicious, and disposable. The experience of trauma thus is the result of a violation and violence that attempts to reduce Black people to a state of pure facticity, the very absence of transcendence, where Black alterity is reduced to the white racist imago. By contextualizing the historical backdrop of anti-Black racism through the examples of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and his personal experience with racial hate speech, Yancy demonstrates how the Black body has undergone a long and enduring history of racialized somatic trauma.

Through a sociological exploration of the My Lai Massacre as one of the significant atrocities of the American war in Vietnam, Ron Eyerman’s chapter draws attention to an aspect of trauma easily overlooked in social analyses: the social pressure to individualize guilt and restrict any attempt to collectivize responsibility. With special attention to the traumatic character of the event of My Lai, his chapter introduces and develops perpetrator trauma as the moral injury that occurs when individuals and collectives feel they have acted in ways contrary to deeply held moral beliefs; as such, Eyerman contends that the mass murder of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai must be understood as traumatic among perpetrators as well, given its unquestionable shattering of individual and collective identity.

Responding to the double bind of the impossibility of witnessing and the necessity of advocating on behalf of survivors, Peter Capretto’s chapter analyzes the potential problem in trauma theory of fetishizing the traumatic lived experiences of others. This begins with the examination of Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of the psychic economy of trauma and Heidegger’s phenomenological critique of the concept of lived experience. Through this, Capretto argues that trauma theorists in philosophy and religion must be attentive to the fetishization of the traumatic lived experience of others, wherein the impossibility of satisfying the ethical demand of witnessing is replaced with one’s proximity to the more visceral and embodied experience. That is, more quotidian attention to our psychic motivation supplements the transcendent task of conceptually understanding the psychic exteriority of others in trauma, thereby elevating the ethical standards the continental philosophy of religion sets for social research into trauma.

In the third section, theologians Shelly Rambo, Marcia Mount Shoop, and Hilary Jerome Scarsella reflect on how religious and Christian metaphysics work within the limits of their semantic, embodied, and violent histories while also pursuing the theological task of preparing the way for healing and recovery from trauma. Rambo’s essay opens this section by examining the connection between poetics and transcendence in light of new trajectories of trauma studies and growing literatures in theopoetics. She argues that while many theologians recognize their work as situated within a post-traumatic context, poetics remains a more elusive challenge for trauma theology. Building from the insights of Rebecca Chopp on testimony and literary pedagogical theories of poetics, Rambo predicts that trauma will become the context out of which theology is done, poetics will be its new form, and transcendence will be rewritten in the process.

Using Christian theology’s ambivalent historical relationship with embodiment as her point of departure, Marcia Mount Shoop examines the practical theological potential that embodied spiritual practices offer for healing after trauma. She argues that even as many core Christian institutions resist the incarnational symmetry between embodied practice and Christian theological professions, bodies explore and embrace healing modalities at the margins of Christian practice. Using the emerging wisdom of four particular healing explorations along the margins of Christian institutional life, Shoop’s chapter explores the contours of Christian spiritual practices that fold out of trauma by attending to the possibilities for institutional transformation around trauma.

The recurrent problems of healing and retraumatization within theological contexts extend into the section’s final chapter by Hilary Jerome Scarsella. There, Scarsella notes that, because the discipline of Christian theology is itself formed around the traumatic narrative of Jesus’s crucifixion, investigating trauma in order to provide useful accompaniment to trauma survivors is theology’s starting point, not merely a secondary interest. Holding the narrative of crucifixion at its center, her chapter asks whether a discipline constructed in response to traumatic rupture is bound to exacerbate systems of retraumatization or has the potential to empower trauma survivors toward recovery. Building upon the scholarship of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century womanist, feminist, and mujerista theologians and the significant risk of retraumatization, Scarsella engages contemporary psychoanalytic trauma theorists to argue that theology’s strength with respect to trauma and contribution to the interdisciplinary task of supporting trauma survivors is its potential as a holding space for diverse stories of both traumatic rupture and recovery.

Because of the connections this volume and its scholars draw between trauma theory, philosophy, and religion, Mary Jane Rubenstein’s afterword responds to the implications and prospects this volume poses to the continental philosophy of religion. With a particular eye toward the contemporary trends and future problems facing her discipline, Rubenstein’s piece not only offers a capstone to this volume and its contributions, but more explicitly connects its labor and insights to the limits and prospects that face the philosophy of religion as it takes trauma as a serious subject of inquiry. Perhaps most importantly, because this volume was conceptualized and its chapters were written prior to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, Rubenstein’s afterword offers a brief but crucial reflection on a political event that many have experienced as traumatic for countless reasons. Like her, the editors recognize that the election has indeed changed the landscape of our scholarship in unforeseeable ways, particularly for those committed to reflecting on trauma.

The projects across the three areas return to roots and seminal moments in the authors’ disciplinary considerations on trauma, parsing out the under-theorized traps that risk stagnating future efforts across their fields. The collection of the scholars as a whole and the structure of the sections in particular connect the interdisciplinary reader in trauma theory with overlapping but adjacent research on these shared limitations. One ambition of the volume is to point out the trends toward insularity within the humanities and social theory around discussions of trauma—a phenomenon owned by no discipline—and to create a forum for scholars to think the prospects and limitations of trauma theory in the humanities.

NOTES

1. Jacques Derrida, Points: Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995); Jacques Derrida, Hospitality, Justice, Responsibility in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Mark Dooley and Richard Kearney, 65–82 (New York: Routledge, 1992); Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michal Naas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001); Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret (London: Polity, 2001).

2. Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996).

3. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

4. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).

5. Cathy Caruth, Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4.

6. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 69.

7. Thomas Elsaesser, Postmodernism as Mourning Work, in Trauma and Screen Studies: Opening the Debate, Screen 42, no. 2 (2001), 201.

8. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965), 210.

9. See, for example, Robert Gibbs, Correlations: Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 4.

10. With the figure of Levinas looming large in this discussion, a thinker such as Jacques Derrida, in his own way, has begun to approach the impossible site with reference to the religious and at times baldly in a theological idiom. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Cornell, et al., trans. Mary Quaintance (New York, Routledge, 1992); Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death; Jacques Derrida, Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone, in Religion, ed. Gianni Vattimo and Jacques Derrida (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

11. Adrian Peperzak, Giving, in The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice, ed. Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Eric Boynton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 162–63.

12. Peperzak, Giving, 162–63.

13. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 120. With Hegel in his sights, Kierkegaard claims that this position cannot be mediated, for all mediation takes place only by virtue of the universal; it is and remains for all eternity a paradox, impervious to thought. And yet faith is this paradox, or else [. . .] Abraham is lost (Kierkegaard, 56).

14. See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 53. He contends that no thought can grasp the paradox of faith that makes murder into a holy and God-pleasing act [. . .] because faith begins precisely where thought stops. Compare this to John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, Introduction to God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, 1–20 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 4. Caputo and Scanlon argue that Derrida’s recent work is seeking out an alterity expressed religiously: "Deconstruction is structured like a religion. Like a prayer and tear for the coming of the wholly other (tout autre), for something impossible, like a messianic prayer in a messianic religion [. . .]. Like a faith in the coming of something we cannot quite make out, a blind faith where knowledge fails and faith is what we have to go on, which even believes in ghosts or specters." See a similar description in Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xxi–xxvi.

15. Proposing the impossibility of philosophy of religion, Marion states: The field of religion could simply be defined as what philosophy excludes or, in the best case, subjugates. [. . .] The ‘philosophy of religion,’ if there were one, would have to describe, produce, and constitute phenomena, it would then find itself confronted with a disastrous alternative: either it would be a question of phenomena that are objectively definable but lose their religious specificity, or it would be a question of phenomena that are specifically religious but cannot be described objectively (Jean-Luc Marion, The Saturated Phenomenon, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, Philosophy Today 40 [1996]: 103). Philosophy of religion either consigns religious phenomena to a faith that knows not of what it speaks or constitutes them as phenomenon simply known, unless, for Marion, a broader range of phenomena are given the right to appear.

16. Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, 21.

17. Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, 58.

PART I

Constructive Phenomenologies of Trauma

CHAPTER 1

Two Trauma Communities: A Philosophical Archaeology of Cultural and Clinical Trauma Theories

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Threshold— —Havdalah: Separation

Open closed open. Before we are born everything is open in the universe without us. For as long as we live, everything is closed within us. And when we die, everything is open again. Open closed open. That’s all we are.

YEHUDA AMICHAI¹

Prologue: The Age of Trauma

In a catastrophic age, [. . .] trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures: not as a simple understanding of the pasts of others but rather, within the traumas of contemporary history, as our ability to listen through the departures we have all taken from ourselves.

CATHY CARUTH²

What has happened in our contemporary world such that the experiences of disaster and displacement, migration and exile, horror and terror, separation and loss, catastrophe and misfortune, humiliation and shame, the nightmare of childhood or the state of exception, and other vicissitudes of life—what Freud called the discontents of civilization—have been reduced to the passive victimization subsumed under the rubric of trauma? Cultural trauma theorist Cathy Caruth calls it a catastrophic age. Why is our experience constructed this way in our time and why has trauma become the emblematic experience of contemporary life to the point that we may invoke the epithet the age of trauma?

It is difficult to characterize trauma as a unified discourse or as a spectrum, even within a given discursive formation such as psychoanalysis or psychiatry. The best strategy to find our way through this thicket of aporias is to discern a shifting, porous, and unstable dichotomy. The investigation of trauma in this chapter straddles both the clinical and cultural poles of this dichotomy; my task, in part, is to make each of them intelligible by placing them in their context through surveys of discourses and practices. In what follows, I describe the poles of this dichotomy under the rubrics of aleph and beth. While they are neither clearly delineated nor discrete, they offer a heuristic for understanding the dichotomized ways that trauma theorists approached the discourse at hand. This requires a different history of psychology and psychiatry and a different genealogy of trauma.

The age of trauma takes place in trauma’s estate. To understand how trauma has become an emblematic clinical experience and trace its pervasive presence as cultural trauma, this chapter conducts a philosophical archaeology in the ruins of trauma’s estate, excavating its many associated discourses and apparatuses.³

Provisionally, we may call archaeology that practice which in any historical investigation has to do not with origins but with the moment of a phenomenon’s arising and must therefore engage anew the sources and traditions.⁴

Philosophical archaeology allows us to discern the relationships among rupture (predicament, state of exception, evental site), trauma (the destruction of experience, of the possibility of experience), and Event (contingent, unpredictable, undecidable). I invoke the work of Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou to oppose trauma to Event, making an absolute distinction between them: trauma does not conduce to Event; Event does not arise from trauma. Human predicaments emerge in evental sites, where rupture occurs. Neither the rupture nor the predicament is predictable or decidable in advance. As trauma psychiatrist Lifton says of survivors of disasters and genocides, we may open out, porous and permeable to novation, or close down, emptied and evacuated, in a traumatized state.

By reading texts at the core of cultural trauma’s preoccupations—fiction and poetry, memoirs and witnessing—through philosophy and critical theory, I illustrate how philosophical archaeology may approach and refresh our understanding of trauma. I contend that trauma is not the generic name of a predicament or even of a particular experience but a generic name for the destruction of experience. Yet it also offers keys for translation—if not paths of reconciliation—among the communities that address trauma and Event: those who hold by trauma/Event as a radical disjuncture, those who hope for a transformation of trauma into Event, and those who harbor the transcendent view of trauma as Event.

A Philosophical Archaeology of the Concept of Trauma

In her genealogy of trauma, Ruth Leys deploys mimetic and anti mimetic theories of trauma.⁵ From the perspective of cultural-intellectual history, Wulf Kansteiner, who cites Leys sympathetically, sees a scientific–metonymic pole and a literary–metaphorical pole of what he describes as a trauma discourse spectrum.⁶ Because spectrum suggests an underlying order, dichotomy or dialectic better captures the dynamic tensions among trauma discourses. Even that is only an approximate characterization as at times the two poles of a perceived dichotomy do not acknowledge or communicate with each other, as Kansteiner contends.

In their inquiry into the empire of trauma, physician/social anthropologist Didier Fassin and psychiatrist/anthropologist Richard Rechtman trace a dual genealogy of post-traumatic stress which they characterize as being divided into scientific and moral strands. The scientific strand, in the domain of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis, addresses trauma both theoretically and in practice. The moral strand, related to social conceptions, traces changes in attitudes to misfortune and to those who suffer it and towards the authenticity of such suffering.⁷

Fassin and Rechtman find the way these two strands interact most revealing. Posing a series of questions about how this occurred over time, across cultures, through disciplines and social discourses, they believe as I do that the key is in examining this dual genealogy at each crucial turning point. They see an underlying "discontinuity marked by the end of the historical era of suspicion that hung over victims of violence" (which I characterize as an epistemological shift away from the experiential cut of Karl Jaspers’ phenomenological psychiatry) and the more powerful continuity toward a moral affirmation of trauma as the ultimate truth.⁸

In some articulations of trauma, these strands are so finely interwoven that separating them requires dexterity to discern the